Annette Mowatt was born on September 23, 1915 to Frank and Sarah Quimby Mowatt in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Her mother was a member of the Mount Holyoke College Class of 1907. Mowatt attended Mount Holyoke from 1932-1936 and received her B.A. in 1936 with a major in zoology. In December of that year she went to the British West Indies to work as a secretary/companion and zoologist for the West India Chemical Company until June 1937. For six months in the winter of 1937 she attended business administration courses at Harvard University. She married Frederick J. Ransom on December 28, 1940, and they had three children. She attended classes at the University of Colorado from 1942-1944 and at Denver University from 1948-1950. She became the school district secretary in New Ipswich, New Hampshire in 1958. She received her Masters in Education from the University of New Hampshire in 1964. From 1966 until her retirement in 1977 she was a guidance counsellor at the Houston Independent School District in Houston, Texas. She died at the age of eighty-one in South Tamworth, New Hampshire on October 9, 1996.